It's the last physics link fest of 2013! Not surprisingly, there were tons of Christmas-themed items circling the Internet this week. Here are the top four celestial suspects for the Star Of Bethlehem. Also: The Twelve Days of Christmas, the Hard Way: How many gifts, in all, did my true love give to me? Bonus: The Best of the British Medical Journal’s Goofy Christmas Papers, such as "Pie sharing in complex clinical collaborations: a piece of cake?"

Rhett Allain says his initial estimation for the amount of gold under the mountain in The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug was WAY too low.

At last! A use for those pesky tachyons: science fiction author and physics professor Gregory Benford proposes the tachyonic antitelephone. Per io9: "If you've ever forgotten to call someone, you know the pain of finally, belatedly, picking up the phone. A tachyonic antitelephone would allow you to phone someone back in time. Because tachyons go faster than the speed of light, they would travel back in time to before you ever made your phone call."

All You Can Feel, photos made by placing psychoactive substances directly on film negatives. Per Laughing Squid: "[A]rtist Sarah Schönfeld visualizes various legal and illegal psychoactive substances by creating photographs from negatives that have been exposed to the substances. To create each image, Schönfeld placed a drop of the substance on to an exposed film negative and waited for it to react with the film."

Can the laws of physics be explained by science? An intriguing viewpoint from physicist Paul Davies."What if the laws of physics as we know them are just accidents, the products of cosmic happenstance?"

Why yes, there is a Baking and Math blog, and here is a sample post: On Failure, Also Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies.

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